Encounter with Antivirus XP 2011

Recently one of my relative got infected with so called fake antivirus programs Antivirus XP 2011. And even though he had installed McAfee antivirus the malware was able to infect the machine. I am in general go-to guy for any computer troubles so I was asked to help him out. I had previously “encountered” this kind of fake antivirus in past to I thought it is not so hard to get rid of this but I was dead wrong (yup, it hurts so say that). This new strand was kind of interesting, even though I was able to remove it from machine it made other functionality cease. So I ended up formatting the machine (which I am doing ryt now while writing my post, yes … I am a multi tasker ). So think post is mainly about how I feel for this incident.

One thing I simply don’t understand that why people don’t use any common sense when they get an email saying they have won $500 Wal-Mart gift card and all they need is to claim it by clicking the link … Or when they are asked to download some funny codec to play some really weird video from some site they have never heard of Or a site offering at 90% off of the iPad ?? (in our case it was free online movie watching site) Some people blame it as a illiteracy of computers but I think it’s just plain lack of common sense. I mean Is it really so hard to understand that Wal-Mart NEVER gives away gift cards like this ??

Trend of creating fake antivirus software it kind of not so new. I have seen such fake antivirus from past 2-3 years. And my understanding is these fake antivirus gets installed via some infected website by some sort of script. I think its not so difficult to use some kind of JavaScript to run some malicious code and do nasty things in someone’s computer. So I think all you need is a browser like IE (I am kind of Firefox fan because of support of plugins) with poor ability to block script and you are in business.

I think the simplest way to prevent your self from getting infected is to disable scripts in web browser. But I find it more difficult to do this task manually in any browser. But if you are using Firefox then you can use a super great add-in called No Script which basically prevents any script for getting executed in browser and you always define which page should allow to run script (like your favorite site). Anyways, I think that despite of having tons of security measures all is useless if you don’t know what you are doing in the first place.

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